Page 174 - A Woman Is No Man

Isra

Spring 1994

The books kept Isra company. All it took to soothe her worries was to slip

inside their pages. In an instant, her world would cease to exist, and another
would rush to life. She felt herself come alive, felt something inside her
crack open. What was it? Isra didn’t know. But the longing to connect to
something filled her. She went to bed bewildered that she had felt herself so
vividly in another place, that she could almost swear she’d come to life by
night and the fictional world was the place she actually existed.
But there were also days when the books didn’t seem quite as soothing.

Days when reading would turn her mind and force her to question the
patterns of her life, which only made her more upset. On these days, Isra
dreaded getting up in the morning. She was aware in a fresh way of how
powerless she was, and this realization flipped her upside down. Listening
to the characters in her books, it was clear to Isra how weak she was, and
the enormous effort it would take to transform herself into one of the

worthy heroines of these tales, each managing to find her voice by her
story’s end.
Isra didn’t know what to do with her conflicting thoughts, didn’t know
how to fix her life. If she were a character in one of her books, what would
she be expected to do? Stand up to Adam? How, when she had a handful of
children depending on her in a foreign place, with nowhere to go? Isra
resented her books in these moments when she thought about the limits of

her life and how easy courage seemed when you boiled it down to a few
words on paper.
You can’t compare your life to fiction, a voice inside her head
whispered. In the real world, a woman belongs at home. Mama was right
all along.

But Isra wasn’t entirely convinced. As much as she tried to console
herself with these thoughts, inside her a flicker of hope had been reignited.